Avoid These Common Baseball Betting Mistakes

While someone who bets on baseball is bound to lose some games here and there, the important aspect is to be able to learn from your losses. If you don’t take the steps to correct your mistakes, you’ll continue to experience the same results. When it comes to novice sports bettors, they tend to be impatient and emphasize short-term results. While positive short-term results are great, positive long-term results is the ultimate goal. In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can avoid some of the more common baseball betting mistakes.

Biased Towards Favorites

Most people who start off betting on baseball tend to gravitate towards betting on favorites – they think favorites are a sure lock to win the game. These bettors tend to focus on reinforcing the idea of why the favorite will win the game as opposed to researching the percentage chance that each team has to come out on top. When you’re only playing favorites, you’ll need to sustain a stellar winning percentage just to make a bit of a profit. On the other hand, when it comes to underdogs, you don’t need to win as often to still maintain a profit. Always look at both sides of a matchup and don’t allow your inherent biases towards favorites skew your thinking too much.

Fading Streaks

Over the course of a regular season, every baseball team is bound to go through both winning and losing streaks. However, the first reaction that an amateur sports bettor has towards a mediocre team on a winning streak is to bet against them – this is a recipe for disaster. From both an individual and a team perspective, baseball is a game of streaks. Even the worst teams in the league are capable of stringing together consecutive wins. Rather than playing the due factor and banking on a streak to come to an end, my recommendation would be to jump on the bandwagon when things are going well (or not so well if you’re jumping on winning streaks) and ride the momentum to some nice profits.

Overvaluing Starting Pitchers

Although the odds for games tend to have a heavy influence from starting pitchers, it’s important to not overvalue their worth to any game. Especially in the modern era of baseball, starting pitchers tend to not last nearly as long – a little over innings is already considered quite good and it means that the starting pitcher has probably pitched well enough to warrant going six or more innings. However, if the starting pitcher is struggling or is not nearly close to being at the top of his game, don’t expect him to make it past five innings. As a team’s bullpen gains importance, these will be the guys to take over the pitching duties if a team’s starting pitcher is struggling.

Ignoring Home-Away Splits

Throughout the course of the regular season, some teams tend to play extremely well at home but very poorly on the road, and vice-versa. It’s important to identify these teams early on during the season and take advantage of these splits. Sometimes, extreme home-away splits may not even make much logical sense but know that in baseball, a lot of factors can influence the outcome of a game. Being able to sift out the general trends will help you go a long way.